


I Lose Balance, I Fall Down

by anais



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Anxiety Attacks, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Non-Explicit, Post-Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-13
Updated: 2013-11-13
Packaged: 2018-01-01 08:57:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1042921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anais/pseuds/anais
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John mourns quietly, it is subdued and prolonged, and John isn't sure if it is proper grief at all, because since the fall everything he does feels like part of a holding pattern he has adopted as he waits for <i>something</i>, <i>someone</i>. Meanwhile, Sherlock becomes an internal companion, a mental voice that narrates John's life, criticising his choices in sexual partners and yoghurt brands.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Lose Balance, I Fall Down

**Author's Note:**

> Everyone has one, don't they? A little 'coping with Reichenbach' indulgence fic? Just little moments captured in my imagined year-and-a-half of John being alone. I haven't shared or posted fic in a long time, I hope you like it!

John feels as if he’s grieving wrongly. He knows what his therapist would say - he knows there’s supposed to be ‘no wrong way’, but he feels chastened and ashamed of himself anyway. Mrs Hudson’s grief is apparently effortless. Her sadness seems practised, easy, methodical and structured. She cries over the phone when John tells her what’s happened, and she cries over the washing up the night before the funeral, and she cries at the church. John is jealous of her.

 

John doesn’t (can’t, won’t) cry. He doesn’t cry at the hospital or the flat or the funeral. In the church he holds Mrs Hudson’s hand and stares at the ornate wooden box that contains his best friend and he feels numb and thick and clumsy with exhaustion. There is a black, hard ache in his chest and a sickly grey fog residing somewhere just behind his eyes that threatens to pour forth and envelop him completely, but he doesn’t cry.

 

Mrs Hudson stands by him at the grave after the funeral and she’s a little bit angry or maybe quite angry for a moment, and then she leaves John to himself.

 

He talks, he pleads, his voice sounds strange and strangled and his requests thud against unyielding, unhearing dirt.

 

He returns to the flat. He’s not sure how long he’ll stay, but for now he has nowhere else to go and nowhere else to be. Mrs Hudson presses a mug of tea (Sherlock’s mug) into his hand, and she touches his head a long moment, petting him in a way that is motherly and sweet, and then she leaves.

 

The next day, Mrs Hudson’s period of mourning seems to be over, her sadness compartmentalised, shelved, put away. She potters about, chats lightly about her friends and her bridge club, and then she leaves and John can’t remember if he even spoke a word to her.

 

He stands under the shower until the water goes cold and then he falls into Sherlock’s bed and sleeps for nineteen hours. When he wakes, he showers properly, shaves and dresses. He makes his way to the surgery and works, and he’s fine, and it’s all fine, and this is how it goes for days that bleed into months and John wonders if he will ever cry again.

 

*

 

After the funeral, Sherlock slowly materialises in John’s mind. At first, John simply hears his own mental remonstrations at his idiocy in Sherlock’s calm, snarky voice, but it isn’t long before Mental-Sherlock begins to provide John with a distant, affectionate, scathing narration of his life. John finds he likes it. He has little fights with Mental-Sherlock about the minutiae of his day, from sartorial choices ( _Your slacks don’t match your shoes, John, you can’t leave the house like that_ ), to dinner plans ( _You don’t even like stir fry_ (“True.”)), to the brand of Yoghurt he’s considering at Tescos ( _That brand? Really? I mean, it’s fine, but you’ve twice opened a new tub to find a little mould colony floating in it._

 

“You injected the colonies into my yoghurt, Sherlock.”

 

_Oh. Well, nonetheless._

 

“I like this brand.”)

 

John is astonished to find that even though he is quarrelling with his own mind, Sherlock still wins about half the time.

 

He begins to see flashes of Sherlock everywhere, and he finds he quite likes that too. Small details manifest into hundreds of visions of his dead best friend - elegant fingers gripping the handle of a cab door, the tails of a long coat disappearing down a side-street, apparently every blue scarf in Britain. He has a little trick to dismiss the visions. He turns his head, and then he turns it back, and when he looks again, Sherlock is gone. It is always a little disappointing, but, John thinks, probably necessary.

 

*

 

John finds a new flat. He tells himself it is temporary, and that is why it never feels like home. Harry comes and puts up fairy lights in his hallway. Mrs Hudson hangs a framed painting behind his couch. He arrives at the flat after work one evening and Sherlock’s violin case is sitting on his coffee table. He never opens it, but sometimes he picks it up and feels the weight of the instrument shift minutely against its padding. Sometimes he props it against his bad arm while he’s typing or reading.

 

He has people over often.

 

_You’ve had Lestrade over for a curry once in eight months and Harry and Mrs Hudson insinuate themselves every now and again. I suppose you’re referring to your fascinating rota of one-night-stands._

 

“Shut up."

 

_The boys are new. I like the boys._

 

“You would.”

 

He keeps himself busy.

 

_You keep yourself distracted._

 

“Shut up.”

 

He cooks in his astonishingly clean and sanitary kitchen.

 

_You miss the mess. You loved it._

 

“Mm. Point.”

 

He reads journals and the paper and he watches an entire season of X Factor without missing an episode.

 

_Boring._

 

“Yeah.”

 

*

 

He sits in a coffee shop and stares at the back of someone’s turned-up collar, their messy mop of curls, for a very long time. It’s been a year. His throat feels tight and hot, his hands clammy. He fights the urge to tap this perfect stranger’s shoulder. It’s not him it’s not him it’s not him.

 

_Maybe it is me._

 

“Shut up.”

 

He walks home.

 

He still doesn’t (hasn’t, can’t, won’t) cry. He just sits with the violin case on his lap and the telly on and practises being still and alone.

 

*

  
It has been raining constantly, heavily, for three days. John is returning from the surgery with a headache and heavy feet. Not to Baker Street, but to Hilton Court - it’s on the same line though, it’s not so far away. After a year and a half, it still doesn’t feel like home.

 

He’s standing, his left arm extended, his hand gripping filthy, clammy metal, the side of his face pressed unavoidably against the slippery fabric of someone’s cheap overcoat. He stares mildly into the crowd of harrowed passengers and imagines their lives - there’s no finesse to his assumptions but they rumble through his mind in its comforting parody of Sherlock’s voice.

 

It comes in a whisper. _Her in front of you, John. Tell me about her._

 

John considers her. White-blond braids and a public school uniform, a hand-me-down blazer and old shoes, summer shoes even though it is the end of autumn, the stitching coming apart. Middle class, then, perhaps.

 

_Rich family, actually. Narcissistic mother. Distant father. Not a wanted child._

 

Oral fixation that will become a smoking habit before she’s eighteen (nails bitten to the  ( _hyponychium_ ) quick, the straw in her soft drink can chewed into a thin ribbon of plastic).

 

_Good. And the man beside you?_

 

Obvious. ( _Obvious_.) Recently divorced, ex-wife burnt all his clothes (there can be no other excuse for the horrid jacket). John finds himself smiling slightly.

 

There is a peel of delighted laughter from Mental Sherlock.

 

“John.”

 

Wait. No. He furrows his brow because he is wrong. That isn’t Sherlock in his head, that is someone’s real laugh, someone really saying his name. It sounds like Sherlock, but Sherlock is dead. John’s eyes shoot up and roam the train, but there is no one laughing. God, he’s finally, properly losing it.

 

Then his eyes catch eyes that are staring at him from just beside him. There are long cold fingers covering his on the pole he’s using for support. Blue green eyes set in an impossibly pale face framed by long dark lashes. No expensive coat. A horrid, scratchy charity shop jacket. He does his trick. He turns his head. But when he turns back, the face is still there, floating incongruously among the generic bodies of home-travelling people around him.

 

Something catches in his chest. For a moment, he thinks it might be a chuckle, a little self-affirming laugh because he’s definitely gone off the deep end. But it isn’t that. It is a foreign, clenching pain. He is far too hot, but there is an icy chill boring through his lower back. His mouth fills with saliva, he is going to be sick, oh god, he’s going to be sick on the tube on the blonde girl’s sodden summer shoes. The train comes to a blissful, halting stop at a station (not his, doesn’t matter) he pushes through the handful of people between him and the open door, knocking the can of drink out of Blonde Braid’s hands and ignoring a gruff northern accent, “Alright mate?” as he takes staggering steps onto the platform.

 

He is aware now that he is shaking, struggling to get breath in. His vision is whiting out at the edges, narrowing to a point, his temperature is all wrong and he hiccups convulsively, willing away horrid, encompassing nausea.

 

John can’t see where the strong hand on his shoulder comes from, but it pushes him onto the cold metal slats of a bench and, gently, but with some force, guides his head between his knees.

 

_Breathe._

 

But no, that isn’t the Sherlock voice in his head, it is Sherlock’s real voice, gravelly, warm and commanding.

 

“Breathe. Take deep breaths. You’re having a panic attack… I think. Probably. I’m certain you aren’t having a heart attack.”

 

“Oh god,” John moans.

 

The hand, maybe disembodied, is solid and heavy between his shoulders. John’s eyes have fallen closed and he focusses on the weight on his back and on drawing in deep, desperate lungfuls of air. The urge to be sick passes momentarily, but takes him by surprise when it returns. He vomits as neatly as he can manage between his feet. He is still dizzy and shaking, his sweat starting to cool. Being sick helps. Steadies him with its unpleasant insistence of sensations.

 

“You fucking bastard,” he manages. He spits, self conscious but unable to stop the convulsive shudders racking his frame.

 

There’s that laugh again. John can’t look up yet, the world is still lurching cruelly, but he doesn’t have to see Sherlock to know he’s there, it’s him, warm, solid and eternal. John feels, absurdly, as if he’d always known this would happen. He knows, more realistically, that he’d just wanted it so very, very badly.

 

*  
  
It takes some minutes for John to gather himself enough to punch Sherlock soundly on the chin.

 

“Sorry.”

  
  
“No, I deserved that.”

 

“Mm. Point.”

 

They sit silently for some indeterminate period. John becomes dimly aware that he is holding Sherlocks left hand in his right hand, that Sherlock is cupping his own chin a little tenderly. He is more astutely aware that they are in a populated (though now, not terribly crowded) train station.

 

“Do you have cash?” John wipes the back of his free hand against his mouth, wanting more than anything to be somewhere private, warm, quiet, and maybe dark. He is starting to shiver now from the cold and the damp rather than his own still-tumultuous emotions.

 

“Yes,” Sherlock replies evenly, “I have cash.”

 

It takes about three minutes for them to get a cab, and about fifteen before they are back in John’s (horrid, sterile, beige) apartment.

 

John stands awkwardly in the hallway for about ninety seconds. Sherlock makes himself at home on John’s couch.

 

“I’m going to shower.”

 

“Good idea.”

 

“Will you…”

 

“I’m not going anywhere.”

 

John becomes aware of a foul, furry taste in his mouth as he makes his way to the bathroom. He turns the shower on first, then, without much thought, brushes his teeth, his eyes open but unseeing. He steps under water that is edging on too hot. He turns his face into the spray. His knees buckle slightly, so he leans forward against the tiled wall. He takes deep breaths, or maybe they are sobs, because he is certainly crying now.

 

It doesn’t surprise him to hear a tap on the bathroom door. He doesn’t respond, and it opens anyway. He turns to place his back against the tiles and he can see Sherlock’s silhouette through the frosted glass panel of the shower as the man perches on the sink.

 

“John…” it isn’t a question, but it sort of is. Hot water sluices through John’s hair, down his face, masking hot, painful tears. John’s throat feels as if it has closed over.

 

“Yeah?” he manages anyway, his voice is broken and hoarse, too high and desperately uncertain, “You alright?” he asks, maybe a little bit ridiculously.

 

“John,” More insistent, and then, “Are you?”

 

“No.”

 

There is a moments pause. John tries to sort out his breathing, but it still comes in small hitching gasps. Then Sherlock is moving, pushing up from the sink and opening the shower door. He steps under the water still fully clothed, and everything he is wearing is quickly drenched. His arms wrap firmly around John’s shoulders, and John presses his face desperately into Sherlock’s chest, gripping roughly at his shirt. John says, “How?” And Sherlock repeats, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” until he has no voice.

 

They stand beneath the water until it goes cold. John is boneless, directionless and lost, so it is Sherlock who manages to get them dry, and into fresh clothes, and into John’s bed. John’s headache has resurged, and he can remember no point in his life in which he’d felt simultaneously so depleted and so content.

 

They fall asleep face to face, breathing in each other's air.


End file.
